Improving signal peptide prediction accuracy by simulated neural network.

The accuracy of distinguishing amino-terminal signal peptides from cytosolic proteins has been improved to 95% by combining a neural network classifier with von Heijne's statistical prediction, the latter is itself 85-90% reliable. The network processed not the cleavage site, but amino-terminal 20-residue segments by the 'tiling' algorithm. Concordant positive predictions of both methods led to the safe identification of 496 novel signal peptides from the Protein Identification Resources.